Instant Messaging. You probably use it at work with your co-workers and at home on Facebook with your friends. But I can’t help but remember how I used instant messaging when it was new vs. the way I use it today, and wonder if something similar isn’t going to happen with social media.
When instant messaging first hit in a big way back in the late 1990’s, there were initially a few big players. (Of course, IRC messaging had been around for a while but wasn’t ever really mainstream.) AOL instant messenger was one of the first to achieve wide adoption, along with ICQ, MSN chat, Yahoo chat, and then a whole bunch of others. Two things about this early IM environment seem relevant to today’s social networking landscape. First, in those early years none of the IM clients were interoperable. In fact, if one service announced compatibility with another the other promptly changed their protocols to break the interoperability (Yahoo and AOL went through several rounds of this chat arms race). The net effect was that for some time if you had some friends on MSN, some on Yahoo, some on ICQ, and some on AOL you had to have four different IM clients running at the same time. Second, IM usage (at least for me) was very different than it is today. When instant messaging was new and exciting and everyone just discovering it for the first time, everyone wanted to chat. A lot. And usually all at the same time. I remember that it wasn’t unusual for me to have four, five or even six or more chat windows open at the same time (in two or three different clients). It quickly became apparent to me that it was darn near impossible to carry on four or five simultaneous conversations—even if they were important or interesting. Today, I use the same consolidated IM client at home and at work and rarely have more than one conversation open at any given time. IM’ing is much more manageable now than it was then.
So what got me thinking about chat, and how the changes I’ve seen might be relevant to future changes to the way I use social media? USA Today had an interesting article a few days ago about how a lot of social media users are grappling with social media overload. The author, Jon Swartz, talked with AOL executive Brad Garlinghouse who said something that certainly sounded familiar: “consumers don’t have the bandwidth to process so many fragmented convos online and, often, at once.” At any given time at work, I usually have browser tabs open for Twitter and Yammer (an internal corporate “Twitter”-like site) and sometimes others like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Quora, Google and at home, those sites plus Reddit and Facebook (hey, I work for a social media firm).
I’ve thought for some time that trying to keep up with all the different things happening in all my different social networks was becoming unmanageable. And guess what, I’m not alone. My suspicion is that although all of us have a different tolerance level to the number of different networks/tools/conversations that we can absorb (and yes, it may be a generational thing), everyone has their limit. I strongly suspect that, like chat, the social networking sites we use today will be integrated in one form or another (probably in some meta-client like Trillian or Pidgen that allow people to use multiple chat protocols in one integrated client) over the next few years, making our social networking lives much more manageable.
This phenomenon of social networking information overload should also raise a red flag for organizations planning to get into social media. If you decide to run your social media campaigns through a popular social networking site like Facebook, for instance, you have to accept all the restrictions and controls that they impose (not the least of which is that you don’t really own your data). On the other hand if you decide to create your own social media destination site that you completely control, you run the risk of being lost amid the noise and bustle of all the other social networks out there clamoring for eyeballs.
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